As Chicago Teachers Strike, Students Are on the Loose and at Loose Ends

Khali Mcdade, left, and Myshun Frierson bought milk on the South Side of Chicago on Wednesday during school hours.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

CHICAGO — For hundreds of thousands of families here, ordinary life has turned upside down. As Chicago public schoolteachers on Wednesday spent a third day on picket lines, their students could be found in contingency programs at schools, in churches and in costly day care centers. Some slept late, stayed home alone, then wandered their neighborhoods as if there were one more chapter of summer.

Others found themselves headed to their parents’ jobs at laundromats, restaurants, libraries, offices. A Chicago alderman, Roberto Maldonado, arrived at City Hall on Wednesday with his 11-year-old son, Rene, in tow. Elsewhere, relatives — grandparents, especially, it seemed — were suddenly being pressed into baby-sitting duty.

So far, many Chicago families have expressed a degree of patience with their new, topsy-turvy circumstances. Some parents — their children beside them — have even joined the teachers’ picket lines.

But as little news of progress emerged from the daily negotiations between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union and the city’s first school strike in 25 years showed signs of dragging on, tolerance was hanging in the balance.

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Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president, has called Mayor Rahm Emanuel a “bully.”Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

“My estimate is that in one more week, parents are going to say they’ve had enough,” said Ariel E. Reboyras, a Chicago alderman from the Northwest Side.

“It’s serious right now,” he added later. “It’s going to get critical at that point.”

Already, the circumstances were creating serious financial strains for some families, particularly those without extra money for day care and without job flexibility. In Chicago public schools, 87 percent of students come from low-income families. More than 80 percent of public school students are African-American or Latino.

“I’m just worried about paying the bills now,” said Sandra Gonzalez, 28 and a single mother, who said she had recently begun cleaning apartments after people moved out, but feared she could not work as much as she needed to now with her three children out of school. “I can understand how the teachers are feeling frustrated,” she said. “But I’m also counting my hours these days, and I’m definitely on the edge to cover my bills.”

For students with nowhere to go, school officials have opened 147 schools for half-day programs and for meals, staffed with nonunion workers. But fewer than 26,000 children attended such programs on Tuesday, far fewer than the 350,000 who found themselves without classes. School officials said they would increase the hours of those programs on Thursday, but some parents said they worried about sending their children to unfamiliar schools with supervision they felt uncertain of.

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With Ms. Lewis pitted against Mr. Emanuel, center, few in the city expect either to back down.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

The strike arrived after months of violence in Chicago — homicides are up 30 percent over last year — and in some neighborhoods, families said they worried that a lack of school might bring still more danger. As of Sept. 2, 1,706 shootings had taken place here since the year’s start, a 10 percent increase over the same period in 2011, and much of the violence has been attributed to young gang members. As the strike began, the Chicago police said they were adding to their presence on the streets, and there has not appeared to be a particular increase in violence.

On Wednesday morning in Englewood, a struggling neighborhood on the city’s South Side, groups of teenagers stood on street corners and outside convenience stores, as children rode bikes down sidewalks and played games in the park. “I should be in school,” said Johvelle Danner, 14, a freshman playing basketball by himself.

“I don’t want to be out here doing nothing,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

Downtown, union leaders and schools officials met behind closed doors at a hotel, but there were no signs of an imminent solution, and the sides seemed to be sparring over nearly everything.

As one union official entered meetings on Wednesday, he told reporters that there seemed no chance a deal would be reached by day’s end. Meanwhile, officials from the school system said they had so far received only one written proposal from the union — a single handwritten page — though they had provided the union a four-inch binder that covered an array of issues. A spokeswoman for the union did not respond to requests for comment. By evening, the two sides could not even agree on whether any formal negotiations had taken place Wednesday or not.

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Public school teachers and supporters in Chicago marched on streets surrounding John Marshall Metropolitan High School on Wednesday.Credit
Sitthixay Ditthavong/Associated Press

The support that some parents seemed to show for the union appears to have been cultivated over a period of months as the possibility of a strike grew. In some cases, teachers explained their situation in letters to parents during the first week of school and in conversations during meet-and-greet nights.

“The moment the sentiment for the teachers is going to shift is if there comes a time when a parent sits down at night and is confronted with wanting to improve the schools but coming to wonder, ‘Is my child suffering now?’ ” said Robert Bruno, a labor and employment relations professor at the University of Illinois. “I don’t know exactly when that comes, but that’s when things change.”

In the neighborhoods here, signs of the strike have been seemingly everywhere in recent days.

Along a main thoroughfare through Little Village, Maria Castro, 17, stood in the shade of the red umbrella of her family’s sidewalk food cart, thumbing at her cellphone as her mother, Florencia, assembled fish tostadas for customers. Maria’s younger sister, Isabella, 9, sat next to her on a milk crate sipping a slushie through a straw, staring at the ground. The two sisters said they had been out here working with their mother, who tends to the cart seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., since Monday.

Maria said she occasionally helped her mother serve water or make change for customers, but mainly she sat back and watched. “We have nothing to do,” said Maria, who is a senior at the Farragut Career Academy high school, not far from the cart.

And on the North Side earlier this week, Zoya Sipem, 72, found herself going to pick up her 7-year-old grandson, Daniel, from one of the school contingency sites.

“All the parents are working, and the grandmothers are watching the kids,” Ms. Sipem said. Her solution: “I think all grandmothers need to go on strike.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 13, 2012, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: In Chicago, on the Loose And at Loose Ends. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe